I meet lots of entrepreneurs and business leaders who are all interested in using Twitter and the other social channels to grow their business and communicate their marketing 
messages. I tell them that Twitter is about relationships, and growing those relationships, which in-turn should help grow their business. I have made quite a few real-life friends and contacts through Twitter and often the relationships started online and then one of us picked up the phone, or Skyped each other, or simply had a good old fashioned meet up.
Twitter has without doubt become the golden boy of the media in the last 12 months, although some of the more upcoming applications like Foursquare and Google Wave are starting to turn heads. The really exciting one for me will actually be Google Social Search, which I think will have quite a substantial impact on the communications industry, similar to the (pardon the pun) waves Google side-wiki has been making.
The question many business owners struggle with is how do they make money out of Twitter and I tell them it doesn’t always work like that, it isn’t an instant process. However, there are many brands which are using Twitter as just a broadcasting platform, to share their offers with their followers and to be honest that can work well for some.
The big Twitter news this week is that Linked-in has partnered with Twitter so users are now able to update their statuses from either platform. I think this is a good idea, although there were quite a few ways around it anyway by using tools like Ping.
The Linked-in Blog comments:
The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.
To be honest, I have always found Linked-in to be a little too static and dry but I know it can be a very useful resource. Most decent recruitment companies have been using it for years to track people down with certain specialisms.
My advice to get the most out of Linked-in would be to add everyone you know and everyone you meet and keep your profile up to date. The extra links you put into this network can prove very useful indeed, especially if you want to get the lowdown on a potential new client etc. For a really good list of ways to get the most from Linked-in try this.
It seems Linked-in is starting to make adjustments to make itself less static and more instant and if this new partnership helps that process then it should be seen as a good thing. I think it’s time for Linked-in to step up and show why it is such a widely used network – it certainly cannot rest on it’s laurels anymore.
What do you think of Linked-in?
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
